I don’t mind offending people. Sometimes it’s necessary to offend in order to provoke thought about difficult subjects. For example, in my “Asians” piece, I poked fun at Asian stereotypes for the purpose of mocking racist white people who never bother to understand or even consider Asian cultures and race relations at the University of Colordao.
And I can deal with the fact that most people don’t read my writing before condemning it. I can deal with people thinking I’m racist. I can deal with the fact that nearly all of my fellow editors at Campus Press have publicly denounced the decision to publish my piece. I can even deal with the death threats.
Up until Feb. 27, I felt good about the conversations taking place. I had set out with the goal of sparking dialogue about racism at CU, and that’s what I did. When I found out there was an anti-racism rally organized by the Facebook group, “Plan for Action in Response to Max Karson’s Hate Speech,” I was thrilled. I’ve been at CU for almost two years, and rarely do I see people of different colors band together in such large numbers.
I went to the rally full of excitement because I thought that the public conversation was going to move forward to the subject of racial tension at CU — a subject that is consistently ignored by the general public, school officials, and the media. But as the event organizers got up and gave their speeches, I felt my insides sink.
Every single speech was focused on my writing. They called it racist, insisted that it was not satire, and demanded that we reject hate speech as a community. The opportunity to bring new stories and ideas to the conversation was wasted on an hour of angry protests against my jokes ridiculing Asian stereotypes.
And that’s what I can’t stand. I can’t stand that people would rather gossip about me than tell their own stories about racism. I can’t stand that the people who experience racism every day would rather waste their energy on demanding the suppression of clearly protected speech instead of adding their own speech to the mix. I can’t stand that our student leaders are simply giving more ammo to the angry conservatives who claim that liberals always suppress dissenting speech.
The sad irony of their CU-sanctioned protest was succinctly put into words by David Chiu: “We as a community seek the immediate resignation of the Campus Press staff and University faculty responsible for the publication of these articles. We do not want a scapegoat offered up for sacrifice to meet the demands of an infuriated public.”
But I disagree. I believe that David and others do want a scapegoat. I stood there and watched the attending university officials smile and nod while David spoke. Do you know why they were smiling? Because even though they’re the ones in charge of the racist hell-hole we call CU, David Chiu still managed to blame the hateful attitudes of thousands of people on a dorky, smart-mouthed kid with authority problems.
And David’s solution, of course, is the same as theirs. He thinks that if they shut me up, he’ll be one step closer to the “hate-free environment” he and others dream of. It reminds me of when university officials apologized for my piece instead of apologizing for the fact that minority students don’t feel safe at their school, and when UCSU passed a self-aggrandizing resolution to condemn racist writing instead of encouraging public dialogue on the subject.
Racism has been driven underground and institutionalized over the past several decades. The days of hood-wearing and cross-burning, at least in Boulder, are over. Now racism lives in policies and micro-messages such as looks, remarks, and avoidance.
If you really want to fight racism, you have to allow people to express it, and then you have to engage it, not stomp it back into invisibility. No matter how much it hurts us, open dialogue is the answer.
My job as a journalist is to create that open dialogue by amplifying the voices of students — even students with racist or other hateful ideas that I disagree with. Your job as an activist is to engage those ideas with community dialogue, and if you find them hurtful or upsetting, to try to change the minds of the people who espouse them.
Now let’s get back to work.
This is a personal statement and does not represent the views of Campus Press.
